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Text by Philippa SnowPhotography by Tom Medwell

If the year following the trip to Peru had been any other year, the memory of it would still feel entirely unreal. I would write this knowing that if you were somebody who travelled, and more specifically the kind of somebody who only travelled in first class and stayed in luxury hotels – the kind of somebody, in other words, who was probably somebody – I might be recommending something you could actually do – you should eat this, you should see this, you should fly this way and buy these things and feed these llamas, et cetera – with all of this lovingly outlined in the same delighted prose that you, the financially comfortable consumer, would expect from the annual travel issue of a fashion magazine. I would have revelled in the weather, which in October last year was very good, and in the landscape, which is and has almost always been a dazzling, barely plausible alembic of unearthly natural beauty and spectacular construction. I would hope to be convincing in my argument that if you, too, decided to take the refurbished Belmond Hiram Bingham^† train from Cusco to the foot of Machu Picchu, you would be better off focusing on the astounding view than the outstanding cocktail menu, even though admittedly a certain level of refreshment does increase a person’s capacity for, say, tearing up – understandably, not at all embarrassingly – at a mountain. I might have mentioned the minor inconvenience of the altitude in Cusco, which is tricky, but not hard to overcome, and my doing so would not have seemed ironic, only helpful. Breathing, I would probably have cautioned, can become more difficult. You may experience an upset stomach, light-headedness, terrible headaches, or fatigue. Try drinking water, often, in large quantities. You would no doubt have looked at the full-colour photographs that appear in this publication and concluded that a little breathlessness was a fair trade – a small annoyance in the face of such unbelievable grandeur.

† The Belmond Hiram Bingham train is painted with an illustration by the artist Fito Espinosa — the first art installation on a train in South America. The Hiram Bingham passes through some of the most beautiful landscape in Peru, from dense forest to open, endless-seeming agricultural plots. The Peruvian farmers en route will, without fail, wave at every passing train.belmond.com/trains

Instead, this is what transpired: on 16 October 2019, I flew business class from London’s Gatwick Airport to Peru, where I spent 10 fortunate, astonishing days travelling between several hotels owned by Belmond, a group specialising in ultra-luxurious stays whose properties are quirky rather than slick or commercial and, in Peru, include a converted 16th-century monastery and a cluster of cabanas on a pretty, viridescent mountainside, the grass kept tidy by alpacas. One particularly crisp and glorious morning, rising early and still stupefied by tiredness, I showered while looking out of my bathroom’s glass ceiling at the Andes, the view so absurdly perfect that it made me laugh aloud. In Barranco, Lima’s bohemian district, we visited the studios of Mateo and Joaquín Liébana^†, two Peruvian artists; we ate at Toshi Nikkei, a renowned Japanese fusion restaurant in Miraflores, ravenous and fogged with jetlag. On arrival at Belmond’s Hotel Monasterio, a building whose religious majesty was somehow not entirely undercut by the enormous porny television that slid up from the end of my antique bed at the touch of a remote, we were greeted by a group of male hotel employees dressed as monks, all aged between 18 and 30, all occasionally chuckling at the sight of each other in hessian robes. At a height of 3,700 metres, I drank a cactus liqueur with the precise, luminous pink colour of a Barbie convertible. On the aforementioned Hiram Bingham train, we dripped cocktails of every conceivable shade on clean white tablecloths and lounged on deco seats that lent each cabin a chic, Murder on the Orient Express vibe, minus the actual murder. About a third of the way up Machu Picchu, we were told by a particularly illuminating guide that we should say “Machu PIK-chu”, for “old mountain”, and not the more traditional “Machu PI-chu”, which is in fact Quechua for “old penis”.

Other details, minor but in some way touching or delightful, remain vivid. It amused us to find, walking in Barranco, a dimly lit English-style microbrewery selling pale ales and dark porters, an “exotic” slice of Britain presumably meant for those Peruvians who had grown tired of drinking ice-cold pisco sours in the sun. In a taxi from the airport to the first hotel in Lima, we were informed by our driver that his life was ruled by two demanding women, whom he loved with his whole heart: his wife and his cosseted cat. It moved me, despite being agnostic, to see Christ being represented in each church not as a white man, but as a Peruvian – dark-skinned with thick black hair, a barrel chest designed for breathing at high altitudes. Dogs, of every conceivable size and every conceivable domestic breed, dipped in and out of shops and restaurants on the streets, half-feral and half-cared for as communal pets. Church services, in Cusco near the Monasterio, were announced not simply with bells, but with the sound of fireworks. A female shopkeeper, enamoured of our photographer’s considerable stature and full beard, took to hailing him by exclaiming: “Hercules! Hercules!” The vistas, sometimes shaped by ancient hands and sometimes shaped by other forces – God or nature or perhaps even the Peruvian Christ – never lost any of their impact, no matter how many times we passed them by. There is no easier way to be made acutely aware of one’s own mortality than to be truly dwarfed by something as large and immovable as Machu Picchu.

† Mateo and Joaquín Liébana, both artists and both sons of the renowned Peruvian art collector Jaime Liébana, operate out of a colourful, bohemian studio in Barranco, Lima’s famed creative district.

Alstroemeria, sometimes called “red elf”, is a Peruvian lily. Its astoundingly bright colour is a perfect match for the rich shades that recur in Peruvian art and design.

Peru has no shortage of stunning, unreal mountain scenery, a fact that more than makes up for the inconvenience of altitude sickness. Visitors can rest assured that the novelty of looking out of a train, bus or hotel window and seeing a gently misty mountain range never quite wears off.

Returning on the plane, I picked up – as I always pick up, without fail, on any flight – some kind of unpleasant respiratory complaint, which took a month to fully shrug off, and which served as a reminder that my immune system was not at its best, and that I probably should not still have been smoking in my thirties. By mid-March, when it became clear that the world was teetering on the edge of something inescapable and frightening, I felt certain that I had already experienced the virus that was sweeping, ceaselessly, across the globe. By early April, I had begun feeling something similar to broken glass deep in my lungs with every breath. (Breathing can become more difficult. You may experience an upset stomach, light-headedness, terrible headaches, or fatigue. Try drinking water, often, in large quantities.) That I had climbed up Machu Picchu six months earlier began to feel ever more unbelievable, more darkly poignant, as the illness ran to two months, three months, four months, five months; I spent April to the better part of June either in bed, on the telephone to a doctor, or being tested for some heart complaint or other at the local hospital, wondering whether or not it was possible for me to die after so many months had passed. Neurologically, I was not quite myself, my ability to form sentences reduced. “I’m having,” I kept saying, “a senior moment”, trying to quash the rising terror that I felt each time I could not recall what a glass was called or what the word was for “unhappy”.

In Peru, the virus has not simply spread, but ridden roughshod over the populace, one of the reasons being that many Peruvians are not wealthy enough to afford refrigerators or require bank accounts, and that therefore they have no choice but to attend the market and visit the bank rather than shielding in their homes. At present, 830,000 of Peru’s 32 million citizens have contracted the coronavirus, and nearly 33,000 have died (currently the seventh-highest number in the world). Oxygen cylinders, already costly, have quintupled in price due to market speculation. “For the communities further in the forest, it’s as if they were sentenced to die,” Miguel Hilario-Manenima, a Peruvian university professor, told a BBC reporter in May. “For the poorest of the poor, what can they do?” To write a travel piece as if this year – a year in hell in global terms, and one of particular punishment for Peruvians – had been any other year would be immoral. To write one as if my own world had not changed would be dishonest. I am lucky to have climbed one or more mountains, and I am extremely lucky to have experienced five-star hospitality and dining in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I am so much luckier to be alive. It is possible that tourism will help to bring Peru back from the brink; I cannot say, being neither an economist nor an epidemiologist. As of now, Peru is gradually reopening after a full seven-month ban on international travel, with those visiting required to provide a negative PCR test or to undertake a two-week quarantine immediately on arrival. At the time of writing, Belmond has not reopened its Peruvian hotels, and the Belmond Hiram Bingham train is not in use. The sweet, conciliatory Gregorian chants that usually play softly in the airy cloisters of the Hotel Monasterio have, I presume, now fallen silent. The transparent ceilings in the showers at the Hotel Rio Sagrado will still look out on the Andes, verdurous and misty, but nobody will be there to see and laugh in disbelief.

Cocktails on the Hiram Bingham train have been designed by the renowned Peruvian mixologist Aaron Diaz; they include the Picaflor Andino with Pisco and citrus, a variation on the classic Espresso Martini, and the brilliantly-named “Belmond Swizzle”, with Cartavio Solera rum, coconut and pineapple.

Opposite, the city of Cusco is one of the most architecturally significant sites in Peru, especially with regards to pre-Columbian indigenous history. The large, smooth stones that characterise Incan building still remain on many streets.

One aspect of the trip, however, feels worth mentioning in further detail for the way it points towards the possibility of something better for Peru: an upscale tourist destination that benefits local Peruvians as well as its wealthy, international clientele. MIL, a restaurant situated in the Sacred Valley at an altitude of 3,700 metres, is a new project by gastronomic wunderkind Virgilio Martínez, a chef and restaurateur whose flagship restaurant, Central, is at present ranked as the fifth-best in the world. “At MIL,” he told Condé Nast Traveller last year, “first you touch the earth, and then you eat from it.” What he means is that MIL^† is not just a restaurant, but a functioning agricultural lab, its relationship with the local community not just close, but symbiotic – the team works with indigenous farmers, finding new ways to develop and reintroduce unusual, traditional crops, serving up meals on dishware made in nearby villages and teaching classes that give locals new skills that can be passed on, perfected, and monetised. MIL’s buzz is, 50-50, split between its cuisine and its ethics. (It does not hurt its coverage, either, that Virgilio Martínez – who is still in his early forties despite a full decade of experience as a restaurateur – may have been engineered in some kind of laboratory himself, so perfectly does he photograph for glossy magazine profiles about his work. Imagine a Peruvian Gael García Bernal, and you are getting very close.)

On exiting the restaurant, warmed by local wines and those distinctive, Barbie-pink cactus liqueurs, drowsy from a combination of fine dining and high altitude, we found ourselves right on the precipice of Moray, a colossal archaeological site of Incan ruins. Deep, concentric circles, running down 30 metres, are carved into the mountainside like a cross between an amphitheatre and a seeing-eye illusion. Historians believe Moray to have been designed for farming, its terraces varied enough in altitude to vary up to 15 degrees in temperature – an Incan experiment meant to allow various crops to flourish in their optimum environments, fully irrigated and planted in soils imported from some distance. MIL, with its new technology and its open interest in the preservation of traditional Peruvian cuisine, sets out to mirror this 15th-century innovation for the modern world. It is difficult to square luxury tourism with widespread poverty in the most ideal circumstances, harder still in times like these, and in a country as hard-hit by the pandemic as Peru, unless that luxury is paying dividends to those whose culture has informed it. On MIL’s website, the usual note about the unusual circumstances of the present is more personal than most: “Our team and the neighbouring communities of Mullak’as-Misminay and Kacllaraccay are safe and well,” it offers, reassuringly, “working on this year’s harvest.” I hope this year’s harvest thrives, and I hope Peru can revive itself, leaving the past behind and embracing a hopeful future. It has been an unreal year, a full stop placed on the world that existed in 2019. In the photographs we captured on our phones, Moray somehow looked even more two-dimensional and unreal than a typical iPhone image, as if it were thwarting – like the moon, whose glow never quite translates to a static, flat digital shot – our half-hearted attempts to record what was unrecordable. Already, after the long flight home, what we’d seen felt like another, distant world. ◉

† MIL, a restaurant set on the edge of the ruins at Moray, balances ethical sourcing and production with delicate and inventive haute cuisine. “At MIL,” its head chef and founder Virgilio Martínez likes to say, “first you touch the earth, and then you eat from it.”